Why did I wiggle and shake the book rack of my fellow high school student in front of me, because it was annoying. I didn’t just want to be annoying I didn’t just want to annoy them either, I wanted to hit something deep in their psyche to find that deposit of anger they had buried for so long that it gushed out of them like a pressurized oil deposit being struck for the first time. There was something wrong with me back then, but here’s the concerning thing, I still consider those shimmy shakes hilarious. Except my enjoyment now comes from the idea that most people think I should feel bad, apologetic, or some level of guilt for doing all that. I don’t. I still think it’s hilarious.

*** 

“I need to pay attention in this class, I need the grade,” Willie said when I ignored his initial, very polite pleas to stop shaking his book rack. “I’m trying to get into Georgetown.” He was trying to get into Georgetown by paying attention, and presumably getting an ‘A’ in an elective class that Georgetown probably would’ve dismissed either way. Yet, he did it. He got into that prestigious school with a full-ride scholarship. He did it by paying attention to the little details that I didn’t, and he probably went on to lead a prosperous, happy life, but I got the giggles watching the otherwise placid expression he wore on his face 24-7 turn from pleas, to frustration, and then anger. My peers were shocked. Not only had they never heard Willie speak, they didn’t even know who he was. When they found out who he was, and that I drove him so crazy that he eventually started screaming at me, they were astounded. It was my biggest accomplishment in life at that point, and I considered it on par with his full ride to Georgetown. 

*** 

“You might want to stop doing that to Max,” a kid named Joe warned me in a different year. “I know him, and he’s nuts. I’m not talking a little off. I’m saying, I went over to his house a couple months ago, and he had what looked like a science exhibit in his room. He had this cord laid out on his bedroom floor, a cord that he cut open on one of those little, oscillating fans in his bedroom, and he pinned that cord back to expose the wires within, and then he plugged it in. ‘What is that?’ I asked him. “My sister keeps coming in my room when I’m not here,” he said. “I want to give her the shock of her life.” That’s what he said, the shock of her life.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “but what does it mean to me?”

“Well, I find it hilarious when you wiggle his chair,” Joe said, “but you might want to be careful doing it to him, because if he’s going to do that to his own sister, what is he going to do to you?”

In my twisted sense of reality, I considered this a challenge to continue, until I saw how much Joe enjoyed it. “Do it again!” Joe whispered between giggles. That whisper ruined the whole aesthetic value this act had for me. I didn’t do it to entertain others, as your garden variety bully might. I did this for my own personal amusement. 

In my non-scientific studies to understand the fragility of the human psyche, my subjects pleaded with me to stop. When that didn’t work, they would resort to some display of frustration that would often evolve to uncontrollable rage. “Stop wiggling my chair!” one fella shouted loud enough for the teacher to hear. After the teacher admonished me, I stopped … for the day. The next day, I was at it again with a vengeance. Another guy tried punching me in the chest. I laughed, but I stopped … for the day. The next day he shouted, “You might be the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” between clenched teeth, and I stopped wiggling his chair or anyone else’s for that matter. His level of rage was one I’ve never seen without a physical followup. We both stared at each other in silence, waiting for a progression, and when it didn’t happen, we went on with our day. Seeing that level of rage gave me an unusual feeling of satisfaction, coupled with this idea that he basically handed me a crown of being the best/worst there ever was at something satisfied a number of needs I never considered before.

Every subject is one great teacher away from being interesting

As I scour my brain to understand who I was, and why I did all that, the best answer I can come up with is that I considered it an antidote to boredom. The structured learning they employ in school wasn’t just boring to me, it was a violation of my constitution. We were all bored in school, of course, but my boredom went beyond an itch to do something, anything else to something that bordered on a hostile rebellion. I considered forcing me, a bubbling cauldron of energy and testosterone, to sit and learn for eight hours a day a violation of nature. It’s okay to do that on a blah day, when you’re not feeling it, but there are days when we’re just on. When you’re having one of those glorious days, it almost feels like a waste to spend them sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture from a teacher who doesn’t want to be there any more than we did. 

I considered school a prison of the mind that I needed to escape, even if just for a moment. I didn’t have an alternative, of course, but I didn’t want to do that. The prison guards held my aimless aspirations in check with attendance records, “Fail to attend and there will be consequences!” I attended class, but one revelation led to another. The first revelation I had was that I was a poor student, but that didn’t move anything, as my grades proved that. The earth-shattering revelation that changed everything for me occurred when someone said, “Did you ever consider the idea that we just didn’t have quality teachers!” This didn’t nullify the idea that I was a poor student, because I could’ve and should’ve found a way to overcome that, but it did relieve me of some of the guilt and embarrassment I felt for getting such poor grades in school. It wasn’t all my fault, in other words, that I was so bored, easily distracted, and anxious that I ended up wiggling the bookracks in front of me.    

I know we’re supposed to praise teachers for the sacrifices they make to teach young minds how to be well-informed, responsible adults, but most teachers, like most people, lack the energy, passion, and charisma necessary to reach students. School administrators know this, of course, so they try to make their teacher’s job easier by providing them a lesson plan and a structure for their lectures. Even with that, most of them cannot avoid speaking in monotone. Most teachers, like most people, also cannot take a step outside the box to provide a brief, interesting vignette from their lives, or the stories they’ve heard, to prove a point or make a lesson plan more interesting. 

I feel for teachers in one respect, I cannot imagine teaching the exact same thing over the course of five to thirty years. I also understand now that part of their job is to teach to the slowest learners in the class. If I was fresh out of college, and someone hired me to teach something as boring as Economics or Anthropology, I have to imagine that I would struggle to come up with an interesting presentation. I would also find it difficult to muster up some passion for the topic. If I did it, it might take me a year or two to develop a level of confidence that could lead to a passionate presentation of the facts. If I were able to accomplish all that, and I understand that’s a big if, I have to imagine that my passion would begin to wane by about year five or six. “You’ve been teaching the same subject for thirty-five years? Congratulations, and I feel sorry for your students.” 

The Glorious Mr. Schenk

When Mr. Schenk entered the classroom, he did not excite that passion. He was not a person who anyone would confuse with an imposing character. He was short, soft-spoken, and mousy. He wore stereotypical school teacher sweaters, and he wasn’t one to look people in the eye. Mr. Schenk was also not a passionate, charismatic speaker, but the difference between Mr. Schenk and all of the other teachers we had prior to Mr. Schenk, was he knew it. He appeared to know that he couldn’t keep students awake during lectures, so he decided to forego the traditional lecture format. 

“Just write!” he said that first day. “Write, write, write!” Just write became his mantra throughout the semester, and just write we did. Anytime we hit a brick wall, he instructed us to “Write your way through it. I’ll correct it, then we’ll correct, and you’ll learn from it.” I can’t remember how many different pieces we wrote, but there were a plethora of them. Mr. Schenk’s modus operandi was that you can’t teach writing. It’s just what you do. It involves something we call kinesthetic learning, or doing it so often that you learn. 

“You should learn how to spell, how to conjugate a verb properly, and you should know the fundamental rules of grammar,” Mr. Schenk said on day one, “but that’s something for other teachers in other classes. For us, it will be about learning everything you can outside this classroom, learning from our mistakes, and learning from others. We’ll spend a majority of our classes dissecting and critiquing what we’ve all written in the prior week.” 

Creative writing was not a subject I found particularly thrilling when I walked into Mr. Schenk’s class, but I might’ve tried to run through walls for him at the end, without questioning why we consider this such a great analogy for loyalty. Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek out alternative sources for knowledge on the subjects we would cover. He provided a list of suggestions, but “These are just suggestions. As you work your way through our ‘just write’ format, I think you’ll find that the more alternative, the better. We’re seeking creativity here.”

I excelled in that class. The method of seeking alternative sources for knowledge fit into my wheelhouse. I learned more from those dynamics than I did any other class I ever took. Mr. Schenk’s class is one of the primary reasons I’m writing this article today. Mr. Schenk assigned one paper exclusively focused on storytelling, another on style, and one specifically devoted to pace. There were so many more themes that I can’t remember most of them, but Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek outside sources to understand these disciplines better. The day after would involve a “What did we learn from our studies?” intro. “Drop the hads!” one student who had understood the assignment would say. “No more you-yous,” you might add, and “You must try to avoid using the word that too often,” and that student would continue to try to avoid that which avoided referring to that too often.  

I wanted Mr. Schenk’s undisciplined, chaotic style of teaching to succeed so much that I chose to succeed within it. I understand that this teacher was a community college teacher, teaching an elective, but I wanted him to trumpet this idea that one of the laziest, most ADHD students who ever sat behind a desk actually excelled in his idea of a lesson plan. I wanted him to spread the word among his colleagues that this might be the key to unlocking the minds of poor students and prevent them from being so bored that they distracted their fellow students by wiggling their book racks.

It probably wouldn’t work, seeing as how lazy and undisciplined young people are, myself included of course, but I thought his teaching style of offering a subject and then allowing the students to learn it on their own, from alternative sources, could succeed in the internet world of charismatic influencers on YouTube. Teachers have some performance reviews, especially in college, but how many teachers are actually fired based on the idea that their lectures are boring and tedious? In the capitalistic struggle for hits and subscriptions, a YouTube influencer needs to find unique ways to maintain an audience, and their struggle involves spending money on graphics and clips that make their presentations interesting and fun. The teacher could say, “This week’s assignment is King Henry VII, go learn everything you can about him, and we’ll discuss it next Tuesday.”  

It’s too late for me now, of course, but this idea goes out to poor students who think different. We all know how individualistic the human brain is. I’m not informed on the science behind it, but for some reason we all learn in different ways. Some are audio learners, visual, and kinesthetic. Minds like mine will never succeed under the current format, but I don’t write that to suggest that I was a misunderstood genius or a prodigy. I may have been such an anxious kid with so much nervous energy that I may not have succeeded regardless the format, but I had teachers who hit me where I lived. Mr. Schenk, Mr. Reardon, and that one woman who interpreted and defined Hamlet for me. So, some teachers woke me up, and they reached me on a level that should’ve defined for me sooner that I wasn’t the horrible student I thought I was. Were they more energetic, I don’t consider that debatable. Were they more passionate and informed, again, not debatable, but they reached me on a level that I still remember with a large asterisk in my life.

To escape what I considered the life-draining minutes of structured learning, I wiggled and shook the book racks of the students in front of me to get some kind of “REACTION!” from them. That was really what it was all about for me, the reaction. The more frustrated and angrier, the better. I thought it was funny most of the times, but I did it so often that it began to lose its edge. I continued to do it, because that’s just the type of (fill in the blank with your favorite invective) I was, am, and forever will be. The difference between then and now is that I’ve learned how to channel all that nervous energy.